Body Parts

Designed for the film lover in mind, SHOUT SELECT shines a light on films that deserve a spot on your shelf. From acknowledged classics to cult favorites to unheralded gems, SHOUT SELECT celebrates the best in filmmaking, giving these movies the love and attention they deserve.

TO THE POLICE STATION!

When Louis Fugain (Grégoire Ludig) finds a dead body in front of his apartment building in the middle of the night, he makes a terrible mistake and reports it to the police. Obsessive police superintendent Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde) makes Fugain his chief suspect, leading to an absurd, all-night interrogation set in a campy ’70s police station and Fugain’s increasingly compromised memories. Soaked in dark humor and bloody fun throughout, Quentin Dupieux’s latest opus, Keep An Eye Out!, is a twisted celebration of classic French police procedurals through the lens of his own nonsensical brand of quirky, offbeat humor, performed by France’s most refreshing comedic talents.

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Knife + Heart.

In the neon glow of 1979 Paris, Anne (Vanessa Paradis) makes her living producing low-budget gay pornography and struggles with the heartbreaking rejection of her longtime lover and current film editor Loïs (Kate Moran). She aims to inspire Loïs back into loving her with increasingly ambitious productions, even using the murders of her actors by a leather clad killer as inspiration, but as the killings continue and her troupe becomes increasingly cautious, Anne assumes the role of amateur sleuth investigating the secret of the mysterious figure that stalks her company. Deftly blending Parisian porn silliness and Italian slasher conventions with a pulsing score by electronic music group M83 and a perfect period production design, Knife + Heart is an affectionately queer tribute to cinema’s body genres and to love in its many forms.

The Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival’s final day kicked off by wrapping up its body horror retrospective with Philip Brophy’s Body Melt (1993). MMC!imagined an Arrow Video edition of the film earlier this summer, back when word of its restoration began circulating. The film now has a packed Blu-ray release compliments of Vinegar Syndrome, bringing this lesser known wonder to the world. The SFFF paired Body Melt with Chris McInroy’s practical effects-based We Summoned a Demon (2018), a fun and goofy short about a couple of guys who just want to be cool and end up summoning a demon. Overall, a fun way to start the Festival’s end.

The Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival’s second day was unusually specific in its program, devoting itself to short films that explored “innocence being encroached upon by outside forces” and a pair of horror-thriller features set around the sex industry. It was an impressive night of screenings, but also one that certainly made demands of its audience.

The “Paradise Lost” block of shorts was long on atmosphere and scares but slim on explication. Most films chose to grab their shocks and get out rather than flesh out their worlds. Faye Jackson’s The Old Woman Who Hid Her Fear Under the Stairs (2018) recalled Bobby Miller’s The Master Cleanse (part of SFFF’s program from 2016 and now titled simply The Cleanse). The short considers the situation of its title character who extracts her sense of anxiety of herself, hides it in a tin, and faces down some dark, ominous threat that stalks her outside her home. Jackson’s film is wonderfully constructed, full of humour and dreadful tension, and its quality therefore demands more of itself, needing to unpack its conflict and its resolution before letting its credits roll. And the same could be said of other shorts in the block. Milk (Santiago Menghini, 2018) is a chilling tale of a boy trapped between two unsettling maternal figures and choses aesthetics over explanation. Wild (Morgana McKenzie, 2018) is a pastoral fantasy about a girl’s encounter with a magical, deadly, and ultimately unresolved female figure in her uncle’s cornfield. Saturn Through the Telescope (Dídac Gimeno, 2018) follows a boy’s efforts to watch a scary movie at home and is a slickly made and energetic short, while Make a Stand (Camille Aigloz, Lucy Vallin, Michiru Baudet, Simon Anding Malandin, Diane Tran Duc, and Margo Roguelaure, 2017) is a gorgeously animated film set in pre-Columbian Mexico and that seems to tease a supernatural spectacle that never arrives. Uncertainty is a great tool of the macabre, but its best used as a lacuna where meaningful questions spring forth. These shorts are uniformly affective and expertly fashioned, sure to be enjoyed by viewers. My only wish is that these films more fully met their narrative challenges as well as the aesthetic ones.

The Buried Alive Film Festival wraps up this Sunday and MMC! is here to tell you why you should go! In addition to another screening of The Golem with a live score by the band Samadha (just in case you miss the screening and performance this Friday), there are two feature films, two supporting shorts, the “Why Bury Good Meat?” short program, and BAFF’s awards ceremony.

There’s plenty of good stuff to see on BAFF’s final day and MMC! has its favourites. Here, dear readers, are five MMC!-approved titles to BAFF this Sunday:

Sure, MMC! made the Buried Alive Film Festival’s first day of full programming sound great, but BAFF really comes into its own on Friday, November 16th. There, BAFF offers three feature-length movies, one live score, one supporting short, and a full program of 10 short films entitled “Bury Me With My Favorite Films.” There’s plenty to see and enjoy at the 7 Stages Theatre this Friday. Those on the fence about attending or those looking for a preview of what to watch thankfully have MMC! to point the way.

Here, dear reader, are MMC!‘s five favourite reasons to BAFF this Friday!